Literati is thrilled to welcome back Phil & Erin Stead for the launch of their new book The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine!
About The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine:
A never-before-published, previously unfinished Mark Twain children’s story is brought to life by Caldecott Medal winners Philip Stead and Erin Stead.
In a hotel in Paris one evening in 1879, Mark Twain sat with his young daughters, who begged their father for a story. Twain began telling them the tale of Johnny, a poor boy in possession of some magical seeds. Later, Twain would jot down some rough notes about the story, but the tale was left unfinished…until now.
Plucked from the Mark Twain archive at the University of California at Berkeley, Twain’s notes now form the foundation of a fairy tale picked up over a century later. With only Twain’s fragmentary script and a story that stops partway as his guide, author Philip Stead has written a tale that imagines what might have been if Twain had fully realized this work.
Johnny, forlorn and alone except for his pet chicken, meets a kind woman who gives him seeds that change his fortune, allowing him to speak with animals and sending him on a quest to rescue a stolen prince. In the face of a bullying tyrant king, Johnny and his animal friends come to understand that generosity, empathy, and quiet courage are gifts more precious in this world than power and gold.
Illuminated by Erin Stead’s graceful, humorous, and achingly poignant artwork, this is a story that reaches through time and brings us a new book from America’s most legendary writer, envisioned by two of today’s most important names in children’s literature.
PHILIP STEAD is the author of the Caldecott Medal–winning book A Sick Day for Amos McGee. With his wife, illustrator Erin Stead, he also created the acclaimed Bear Has a Story to Tell, Lenny & Lucy, and The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, based on a previously-unpublished children’s story by Mark Twain. Philip has also written and illustrated his own books, including Hello, My Name Is Ruby; Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat; and A Home for Bird. Philip and Erin live in northern Michigan.
ERIN STEAD is the illustrator of eight picture books, including the Caldecott Medal–winning A Sick Day for Amos McGee; The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, illustrated by Philip Stead and based on a previously-unpublished children’s story by Mark Twain; And Then It’s Spring, a 2012 Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book and a Best Children’s Book of 2012 by Kirkus and Publishers Weekly; Bear Has a Story to Tell, a Best Children’s Book of 2012 by Kirkus; and The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles, named a best book of the year by Time, People Magazine, the Boston Globe, and School Library Journal. She lives in northern Michigan with her husband, author/illustrator Philip Stead.
Readings by these 2 writers. Born in Saigon and raised in Connecticut, Vuong writes poems that explore transformation, desire, and violent loss. His debut 2016 collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has been praised by the New York Times for its “powerful emotional undertow … that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.” Gates is an acclaimed fiction writer, dubbed “John Updike Without God,” whose 1991 novel, Jernigan, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His 2015 collection, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, is “brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters,” says New Yorker critic Ben Marcus. “These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories.”
5:30 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710.
Literati is excited to host a reading from three wonderful poets; Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Heather Derr-Smith and Molly Spencer.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage. Her poems have been published in American and international journals including Blackbird, The Boiler, Borderlands Texas Review, The Indianola Review, James Franco Review, The Lake for Poetry, Lunch Ticket, Mizna, The Ofi Press Mexico, Sukoon, and the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. Several of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, “Immigrant” in 2015 and for “Middle Village” and “Ruin” in 2016. She is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her family.
Heather Derr Smith is a poet and human rights activist and the author of four books of poetry, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and Thrust winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award (Persea Books, 2017. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and divides her time between Iowa and Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Molly Spencer’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, The Missouri Review poem of the week web feature, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. Her critical writing has appeared at Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and is a poetry editor at The Rumpus. Find her online at www.mollyspencer.com.
Literati is excited to welcome Lucy Ives for a reading from her new novel Impossible Views of the World.
About Impossible Views of the World
Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan’s renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with “a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist” is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot: CeMArt’s current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world’s water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that’s making the rounds, and her mother—the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro—wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze.
But the appearance of a strange map, depicting a mysterious 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella—a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don’t ask)—on an all-consuming research mission. As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum’s colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul’s been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life. Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your mind and heart intact.
Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including Anamnesis, a long poem that won the Slope Book Prize, and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Artforum, n+1, Conjunctions, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with Triple Canopy, the Brooklyn-based online magazine. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at NYU.
Literati is excited to welcome author Tiya Miles who will be discussing her new book Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits
About Dawn of Detroit:
Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city: Detroit.
In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.
A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery’s American legacy.
Tiya Miles is the recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and is a professor at the University of Michigan in the departments of American culture, Afro-American and African studies, history, women’s studies, and in the Native American Studies Program. She lives in Ann Arbor.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is excited to welcome Katie Willingham who will be reading from her new poetry collection Unlikely Designs
About Unlikely Designs
A collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge-making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits—well, I mean, sorry, yes—prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.
Katie Willingham teaches writing at the University of Michigan.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
Tonight Literati is excited to welcome author Steven Gillis who will be reading from his new novel Liars
About Liars
Eric McCanus is a novelist with the misfortune of having written his one great book when he was young. Struggling to write more, recently divorced, cynical toward marriage while still missing his ex-wife, Eric becomes convinced that happy relationships are unsustainable. He sets out to prove his theory when he spots a seemingly perfect couple, Cara and Matt, at the market. Convinced that Cara and Matt’s marriage can’t be as successful as it appears, Eric does what he can to break them apart, using his power as a one-time great novelist. What follows is a psychological and philosophical comedy of errors. Liars is an exploration of love, relationships, and human interaction—a madcap romp through the vestiges of modern affairs—revolving around five characters, each spun drunk on the batterings of love while attempting to sustain themselves in a false world.
“Steve Gillis was born to write Liars, the mesmerizing, noirish story of Eric McCanus, a writer, professor, music aficionado, bon vivant. This lyrical, fast-paced novel is chock-full of intrigue, slight paranoia, plans gone awry, and outright mystery. One couple, pushing the same grocery cart, serves as Gillis’s madeleine. And then the reader’s taken on one fun bumpy jolting ride.” — George Singleton, author of Calloustown
“Writers may control the plot on the page, but can they bend real-life to their purposes? In the story of writer and dilettante Eric McManus, Gillis explores the slippery slope between love and commitment, with McManus determined to prove love’s folly by interfering in the marriage of a happy couple. Reminiscent of Pinter and Mamet, Gillis writes a sharp but strangely vulnerable comedy of errors that shows sometimes the ringmaster is really the dancing bear.” —Jen Michalski, author of The Summer She Was Under Water
Steven Gillis is the author of five novels and two short story collections. A founding member of the Ann Arbor Book Festival Board of Directors, and a finalist for the 2007 Ann Arbor News Citizen of the Year, Steve taught writing at Eastern Michigan University. In 2004 Steve founded 826Michigan, a mentoring program for students. In 2006 Steve co-founded Dzanc Books. Steve lives in Ann Arbor with his wife Mary, and two dogs, and regular visits from their kids, Anna and Zach.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back Douglas Trevor who will be sharing his new collection of stories The Book of Wonders
About The Book of Wonders:
A lonely female accountant falls for a man who seems to have stepped out of a Greek myth; a scholar uncovers a lost Shakespearean couplet and decides to quit academia; a celebrated author experiments with downloading a story from her brain and uploading it to another. In these and other stories, Douglas Trevor explores situations–both unsettling and comic–in which people lose their bearings, reinvent themselves, and resolve, sometimes haplessly, to make sense of their lives. Characters are kidnapped by teenagers; they are bitten by raccoons. Some of them go on Prozac; while others rely on bowling to persevere. Running through these nine stories is the ghostly, and at times material, presence of books themselves. What does it mean to turn to books for comfort? Or to uncover the ways in which the stories we absorb and revisit not only open up worlds but also close them off? In a variety of moods and settings, The Book of Wonders reminds us not only of the struggle to connect, but also of what the most unlikely of people may realize they share.
“The Book of Wonders is aptly titled. These are richly inventive and deftly executed stories that brim with life–unpredictable, lyric, energetic, ‘storytelling’ at its finest. Doug Trevor is intrigued by the vicissitudes of ‘character’ and his stories touch upon moral, intellectual, spiritual issues that engage us all.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“The Book of Wonders is lovely, and, yes, wondrous. With one foot in contemporary life and another in the land of myth and fable, Douglas Trevor is a unique and memorable conjurer.” – Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
Douglas Trevor is the author of the short story collection THE THIN TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE (winner of the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction), and the novel GIRLS I KNOW (winner of the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize). His short stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including (most recently) Ploughshares Solos, The Iowa Review, and New Letters. A professor of English literature and creative writing, he is the current Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
